We're trying to use IIS shared configuration on Server Core 2012 R2.
It works perfectly with one exception which is that if the SMB share that stores the IIS config files goes offline IIS crashes and won't automatically recover even if the SMB share comes back online.
The only solution I can find to this issue is this article (https://www.iis.net/learn/web-hosting/configuring-servers-in-the-windows-web-platform/offline-files-for-shared-configuration) which describes setting up offline files.
The problem with that is that offline files is part of the desktop-experience feature which requires "Server Graphical Shell" and "Graphical Tools and Infrastructure". So to utilize that we'd need to basically convert our server core boxes to the full version of windows. Not exactly what we want - we're using server core to minimize the footprint of our servers.
I'm trying to figure out if there is some alternative we can use. I've found several different solutions which will sync content from the SMB share to the local PC (GoodSync, SyncBack Pro, Sync Toy, etc) - that's no problem.
The issue is that offline files "intercepts the API call to access the files on the file server, and get the data in the local device cache". So it transparently takes care of redirecting the request from the remote share to local storage. None of the alternatives I can find to offline files handle this piece.
Does anyone know of any syncing tools that would transparently handle redirecting requests to the local filesystem when the smb share is unavailable?
Instead of a simple failover, you should implement a Scale-Out File Server for Application Data (Overview)
It's a continuously available file server that can be realised with a (guest) cluster by configuring the file server role. The documentation covers all the steps, but it's roughly:
If one of the cluster nodes dies, the failover is instantly. You'll be able to watch a movie from the continuously available SMB share and you won't even note that one node went down.